Bios (6 page)

And in the midst of death. Real death. The depth of emotion in the room was daunting. Dieter Franklin had lowered his head
to disguise tears; Elam Mather was openly weeping, and she wasn't the only one.

Two mysteries, Zoe thought. Isis and grief. Of the two, she understood Isis better. How would she feel if someone close to her had died? But there was no one close to her. There never had been. Only Theo, as severe and aloof as some black-winged bird, her teacher and savior. What if it were Theo's body out there? Would she weep? Zoe had wept often when she was young, especially during her dimly remembered time at the Tehran orphan crêche. From which Theo had saved her. Without Theo . . . well, without Theo, she would be lost.

Free
, some traitorous part of her whispered.

The thought was disturbing.

Tam Hayes, tall and somber in his Yambuku fatigues, read a brief but dignified eulogy. Then a young biochemist named Ambrosic, the last Reformed Mormon at Yambuku now that Mac was gone, offered a formal prayer for the dead.

On some hidden cue, the attending tractibles doused the bier with hydrocarbon compounds and ignited it with a jet of flame. An external microphone relayed the sound with horrible fidelity, the whoosh of ignition and the slow crackle of the burning wood.

The heat lofted Macabie Feya's ashes high into the Isian sunlight. Wind carried away the smoke. His phosphates would fertilize the soil, Zoe thought. Season by season, atom by atom, the bios would have the whole of him.

Zoe had been sent to Isis specifically for the deep-immersion project, but until the day she would step out of the station, she was a Yambuku hand and had to find a niche for herself. She was neither a microbiologist nor an engineer, but there was plenty of ordinary scutwork to do—filter changes, cargo inventory, scheduling—and she made herself available for all these duties. And day by day, as the shock of Mac Feya's death eased, she felt herself becoming . . . what? If not a member of the Yambuku family, at least a welcome accessory.

Today, a week since the funeral, Zoe had invested eight hours on cargo inventory, which meant lots of physical labor even with the freight tractibles helping. She took a quiet dinner in the refectory and retired to her cabin. More than anything, she wanted a hot shower and an early bed . . . but she had only just dialed the water temperature when Elam Mather knocked at the door.

Elam was dressed in after-duty clothes—loose buff shorts and blouse—and her smile seemed genuinely friendly. “I've got tomorrow's duty roster. Thought you might want a quick look. Or just to talk. Are you busy?”

Zoe invited her in. Zoe's cabin was small, a bedroll and a desk and one wall with a screen function. Once a month or so, compressed edits of Terrestrial entertainment were fed down the particle-pair link from Earth. Tonight most of the station hands were screening the new
Novosibersk Brevities
in the common room. Zoe had linked her screen to an outside camera and the only show she wanted to see was the sleepy crescent of Isis's moon as it fled across the southern stars.

Elam entered the room as she entered all rooms, brusquely, arms at her sides, tall even by Kuiper standards. “I'm not much for light entertainment,” she said. “Guess you're not either.”

Zoe wasn't sure how to react. Elam didn't flaunt her rank, but she was one of Yambuku's key people, second only to Tam Hayes himself. Back home, it all would have been clear. Junior managers had deferred to her and she had deferred to her seniors—and everyone deferred to Family. Simple.

Elam dropped the roster sheets on Zoe's desk. “It's a desert around here when the entertainment package comes in.”

“They say this one has good dancing.”

“Uh-huh. Sounds like you're about as enthusiastic as I am. I'm just an old Kuiper fossil, I guess. Where I come from, dancing is something you do, not something you watch.”

Zoe couldn't think of an answer. She didn't dance.

Elam glanced at the active wall screen. Zoe had maxed the resolution, creating the illusion that her cabin had lost one wall and was open to the Isian night. Yambuku's perimeter lights picked out
the nearest trees, starkly bright against the velvet-dark forest. “No offense, Zoe, but you're like a ghost sometimes. You're here, but all your attention is out there.”

“It's what I'm trained for.”

Elam frowned and looked away.

Zoe added, “Did I say something wrong?”

“Excuse me? Oh—no, Zoe. Nothing wrong. Like I say, I'm just an old Kuiper fossil.”

“You read my personnel file,” Zoe guessed.

“Some of it. Part of the job.”

“I know how it must sound. Sole survivor of a clonal pod, designed for Isis duty, lost in an orphan crib for three years, mild aversion to human contact. Freakish, and I guess. . . very
Terrestrial
. But I'm really—”

She began to say,
no different from anyone else
. But that was a lie, wasn't it? Even on Earth, she had stood a little apart. And it was part of her qualification for the job.

“—trying hard to fit in here.”

“I know,” Elam said. “And I appreciate it. I want to apologize if we've been slow about breaking the ice. Mostly it's what happened to Mac, nothing to do with your history.”

Zoe noted the qualifier.
Mostly
. But that was fair. The majority of the scientists at Yambuku were Kuiper-born. The old-time Commonwealth Settlement Ministry had populated the first Kuiper Body settlements with citizens gen-engineered for long isolation and the claustrophobically tight conditions in the water mines. Unfortunately, it had been a faulty sequence-swap. The undetected bug in their altered genome had been unexpected, late-life neurological decay, a congenital nerve-sheath plaque difficult to cure or contain. Of that generation of Kuiper settlers, those who survived the rigors of first settlement had died screaming in inadequate clinical facilities far from Earth. Only a hasty program of sequencepatching had saved their children from the same fate. Most of them.

Kuiper veterans would tell you they feared heavy-handed Terrestrial gene-tinkering aimed at population control, not the process itself. But family history made it a ticklish issue. Zoe was a clonal
birth whose life had been designed and tailored for Trust duty. Her Kuiper-born colleagues must find that distasteful.

“What I'm saying, Zoe, is that none of that matters much. Because you're one of us now. You have to be. We're sitting at the bottom of a hostile biological ocean, and Yambuku is a bathysphere. One leak and it's over for all of us. In that kind of environment, we can't afford anything less than mutual trust.”

Zoe nodded. “I understand. I'm doing my best, Elam. But I'm not . . . good with people.”

Elam touched her arm, and Zoe forced herself not to flinch. The older woman's hand was warm, dry, rough.

“What I'm trying to say is, if you need a friend, I'm here.”

“Thank you. And I'm sorry if this sounds rude. I look forward to working with you. But . . . I don't want a friend.”

Elam smiled. “That's okay. I didn't say ‘want.' ”

The days passed, each day a step closer to her liberation from the confinement of Yambuku. Outside, a week of rain gave way to vivid sunshine. The station's device shop processed Zoe's excursion suit, duplicating its files and testing its capacities, green-lighting its function inventory item by item. Zoe spent the lag time patiently, learning the first names of Yambuku's sixteen current residents. Of these, she was most comfortable with Elam Mather and Tam Hayes, the device-shop engineers Tia and Kwame and Paul, and the planetologist Dieter Franklin.

“We're close to a go-ahead on your excursion technology,” Tam Hayes told her. “The technicians are impressed. We were told to expect something novel. This is more than novel.”

Zoe pushed a cargo cart down the long windowless enclosure of the south quarter. The cart's wheels rattled against the brushed-steel floor. She tried to imagine how this place must have looked when the tractibles and Turing constructors were assembling it. A metal catacomb attended by mechanical spiders, steel and metacarbon panels lofting down from orbit on guided parachutes.

Today was mainly sunny and warm, according to Hayes. Not that she could tell from the timeless monotony of this walkway. “Days like this,” Hayes said, “we often send the dragonfly remensors out.”

Zoe looked up from her work.

Hayes said, “Interested?”

Yes, very much.

“Your file says you can handle this kind of remote. Is that correct?”

Zoe adjusted the headset to fit her skull. “Yes.”

“And you know the terrain?”

“From simulations.”

“Okay. We'll call this a training jaunt. Just keep me in sight at all times and do as I say.”

Yambuku operated its telepresence devices from a console room no larger than Zoe's cabin. She was aware of Tam Hayes in the chair next to hers. In Yambuku's ultraclean environment, odors became more intense. She could smell him—a clean smell, soap and laundered cotton and his own unique scent, like spring hay. And, alas, herself: nervous, eager. She activated the headset and the room fell away from her awareness—though not the scent.

Hayes activated the remote, and two dragonfly remensors rose from a bay at the periphery of the shuttle dock into the still noon air.

The remensors' fragile wings glistened with photoelectric chiton cells, microscopic prisms. Their elongated bodies curled downward for stability as the devices hovered in place.

Zoe, wrapped in the headset and hands on the controls, saw what her remensor saw: Yambuku from a height, and the wooded rift valley infinitely deep and wide beyond it, an unbroken canopy of green dappled with gentle cloud shadows.

Her heart hammered. Another wall had fallen. Between herself and Isis there were many walls, but every day fewer, and soon enough, none; soon enough, only the insensible membrane of her excursion suit. The two realms, her Terrestrial ecology of blood
and tissue and the deep Isian biosphere, would come as close to physical contact as technology permitted. She longed to touch her new world, to feel its breezes on her body. The feeling was startling in its intensity.

Tam Hayes spoke. He was sitting beside her at the console, but his voice seemed to ring out of the bright blue sky. “We'll take it slowly at first. Follow as close as you can. If you lose sight of my remensor, use the display target to find me. And don't be afraid to ask questions. Ready, Zoe?”

Stupidly, she nodded. But with his headset on he could see only her dragonfly remensor, a device identical to his own. “Ready,” she said belatedly. Her hand trembled on the guide stick. Her remensor quivered responsively in the sunlight.

“Up to three thousand meters first. Give you the long view.”

As quickly as that, Hayes' remensor spiraled into a vertical ascent. Zoe promptly guided her own dragonfly upward, not following him slavishly but keeping pace, demonstrating her ability. In the upper left corner of her headset an altitude readout flickered ruby iridescence.

At three thousand meters, they paused. The winds here were stronger, and the dragonfly remensors bobbed like hovering gulls.

“Altitude is the best defense,” Hayes said. “Given the cost of these remotes, we prefer to keep them away from insectivores. The greatest danger is from aviants. Any large bird within a kilometer will toggle a heads-up alert, at least here in the open. Down in the canopy, things are trickier. Keep your distance from trees if at all possible, and stay at least five or six meters off the ground. Basically, stay sharp and watch the telltales.”

She knew all this. “Where are we going?”

“To the digger colony. Where else?”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Zoe decided she liked this man Tam Hayes.

The dragonfly remensors relayed only audiovisual information. As they moved westward, there was no physical sensation of flight. Zoe remained aware of the pressure of the chair against her buttocks,
her solid presence in the remote-sensor chamber. But the images she saw were deep, rich, and stereoscopic. And she could hear clearly what the remensors heard: at this altitude, only a gentle rush of air; lower, perhaps the trickle of water, the cries of animals.

Together, they flew across the glinting ribbon of the Copper River, named by Hayes' predecessor for his Kuiper Clan. Large aviants and small predators had gathered to drink along the sandy shore, where slower waters pooled. She saw a herd of epidonts sunning themselves in the shallows. Beyond the river the forest canopy closed tight once more, seed trees and spore trees undulating like so much green linen toward the foothills of the Copper Mountain range.

“It's all so familiar,” Zoe whispered.

“Maybe it seems so.” Hayes' voice came from the empty sky beside her. “From this height, it might almost be equatorial Earth. Easy to forget that Isis has a wildly different evolutionary history. Work we've done in the last six months suggests that life here remained unicellular far longer than it did on Earth. In Terrestrial organisms, the cell is a protein factory inside a protein fortress. Isian cells are all that but better defended, more efficient, far more complex. They synthesize a staggering array of organic chemicals and exist in far harsher environments. On the macroscopic level—in multicelled organisms—the functional difference is minor. The complexity is what matters. A carnivore is a carnivore and it relates to herbivores in the obvious way. Get down to the cellular level, the fundamental bios of the planet, and Isis looks a lot more alien. And more dangerous.”

Zoe said, “I meant the terrain. I've flown this way in a thousand sims.”

“Sims are sims.”

“Survey-based sims.”

“Even so. It's different, isn't it, when the landscape is alive under you?”

Alive, Zoe thought. Yes, that was the difference. Even the best sims were only a sort of map. This was the territory itself, moving, changing. A passage in an ancient dialogue between life and time.